On a cool afternoon in Washington Square Park, a petite 76-year-old woman wearing Versace sunglasses and a hoodie took in the scene around her. Her name is Judi Jupiter, and while street musicians played guitars and New York University students read books on the benches, she was looking for something.
She spotted a tall young man wearing a red Balenciaga sweatshirt and Timberland boots. He ran towards him, cell phone in hand, and started filming.
“Look at you,” he said. “What’s your name? What’s your Instagram? What do you do?”
He replied that he was a 21-year-old model named Waylon Rose.
Jupiter asked his characteristic question: “Want to take a ride for me?” He turned to her with a podium gesture.
“You’re Judi Jupiter, right?” he said. “Your messages got around a lot. I guess I was hoping that one day I would meet you and you would stop me.”
Among audiences on Instagram and TikTok, Judi Jupiter has established herself as one of the most unlikely chroniclers of downtown New York street style. She broke through the algorithm with her affable demeanor and almost overwhelming curiosity.
“I love Generation Z,” he says. “I love their attitude. They think the world is bad and we need to make it better.”
“Everyone has seen my video with Sabrina Carpenter,” he continues. Jupiter’s meeting with Carpenter last summer attracted legions of followers to his TikTok and Instagram accounts. The footage, which has racked up millions of views, shows Jupiter interviewing the pop star as she walks through the SoHo neighborhood.
His subsequent interviews with other young celebrities, such as Troye Sivan and Kyrie Irving, have only added to his social media mystique.
“I never know who these people are,” Jupiter said. “I don’t read the newspaper or follow the news. I cry when I read the news, so why would I?”
As night approached in SoHo, she scanned the streets with a vigilant eye.
“More than 600,000 people follow me now,” he says. “It scares me so much.”
Lately, Jupiter has started making money from its content. She receives requests from record labels to promote their artists with staged versions of her eccentric street interviews, for which she charges up to US$2,500 (R$13,000). “I’m looking for an agent,” he said.
I asked her if she felt shaken by a celebrity’s rejection.
“No, because they are all the same to me,” she said.
Judi Jupiter was born Judy Lynn DeLong in 1949 and grew up in Detroit as the daughter of a successful sheet metal engineer.
“I was born fast, competitive, ambitious and blessed with a great body, but I was also born in the Midwest,” Jupiter explains. “When I was a teenager, I would meet ten friends a day, wear them out and find a new one. Growing up, I was always bored.”
At 24, he drove to New York with his two cats. He got a job at Macy’s, got into the downtown punk scene and started dating a bartender. To help pay the rent, he did nude modeling work. Some of her photos appeared in the pornographic magazines Cheri and High Society.
“When Studio 54 opened, my hairdresser boyfriend told me it would be the hottest thing ever,” Jupiter says. “I believed him, because hairdressers know everything in New York.”
She asked around and discovered that Studio 54’s PR agency was Gifford-Wallace. She visited their offices one afternoon and introduced herself as an advertising photographer. They put her on the roster, along with Meisler, and the job was to make the club as glamorous as possible.
Often wearing only a bikini, she trained her camera on scenes of celebrities’ unprotected activities night after night. Moments etched in his mind include model Janice Dickinson hanging from the rafters while singing for Mick Jagger.
Jupiter led the way to his living room. Stacked everywhere were portfolios of his Studio 54 photos and clippings from columns he wrote for adult magazines. She flipped through some favorite photos. Next to the pictures were notes she had scribbled long ago.
When the club went into decline in the 1980s, Jupiter made its exit. “I was bored,” she said. She had done some modeling work on the side, so she decided to open her own agency: Judith’s Models.
His agency thrived until the 1990s, with a roster of 80 models. So she broke consumer regulations by promising jobs to potential models and operating without a license. His reputation has sunk. Television crews monitored his workplace.
“They couldn’t put me in jail for that,” Jupiter said. “But every time I got in trouble, I ignored it. I’m still like that.”
As she entered her 60s and the pandemic hit New York, she lived on unemployment benefits. That’s when he started documenting the city on his phone and posting stories on his Instagram account. His first videos included conversations with an elderly woman drinking a margarita alone at a Mexican restaurant. Then she found her theme: Generation Z.
“I had become an angry person because of everything that had happened, but I started to feel like the old Judi again, the one who came to New York all dreamy. The girl from Studio 54. Except I had never gone viral before.”
That night, Jupiter was looking for more content.
Outside Sofia’s Restaurant on Mulberry Street, she was attracted by a thin man wearing a white beret and loafers. It was a 28-year-old animator, Lautaro Posadas. She came closer.
“You filmed me a long time ago, when I was just starting out,” he says. “Now you’re okay. I always watch your videos. Everyone wants to be a star in New York, I guess.”
Jupiter had already pointed her phone at him.
“Want to take a ride for me?”
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